Inspiration for me comes from sooooooooooooo many areas; life experience, an interaction with someone, a place I've been, media I've consumed. etc. But if I had to define the main source it'd be my own, overactive, often times intrusive mind. It goes without sayin' ya' boy Oz has lived an interesting life. Grew up in the South Bronx during the 90s, served in the military the majority of the 2000s. Spent time on 6 of the 7 continents of the world and have seen a LOT with these brown eyes...good and bad. I've seen humanity at it's absolute best and it's deplorable worse. I've had experiences I wish I could share with the world, and experiences I wouldn't wish another soul to ever have to relive. And it all manifests itself in my content.
I've always been a story teller. Since as far back as I can remember. When I was youth, I wanted to be a comic maker. I was actually quite a good artist. But then I went and got a girl pregnant at 18, and enlisted in the Marines a year later because a high school diploma wasn't going to get me where I needed to be in life, and I'm wasn't the college going type. But my creativity never died. It manifested itself in other ways. The most notable ways were short stories I would write while not on deployment. As some of you may know, I've very big on professional wrestling. I ran my own pro-wrestling forum for a few years after I EAS'd from the corps. A friend of mine knew about my writing, and was a booker for a local wrestling promotion here in the New York City area, so he asked me if I'd be willing to write for them for some extra cash. I of course accepted, and had a blast doing so. During this time I also partook in what was called "E-Feds" (Electronic Federations)...basically fictional wrestling federations where all content is role played. Accept for the feds I partook in, we'd use the WWE2K series of games to create original characters and roleplay them. These games also served as one of the biggest outlets for my creative itch for many years. Below are some of my characters from the last game, WWE2K23:
I'd always contemplated using TK17 to make comics since as far back as the heyday of MG. I forget the user, but both him and @ArtsAndCrafty created very well produced and thought out comics that barely got recognition because...
1. Trying to find anything outside of the main page was lesson in futility
2. If it didn't have overt frontal nudity it hardly ever got noticed...let alone recognized.
They both inspired me even way back then, but I didn't actually pull the trigger on trying it until 2020 when we opened KE. The rest is of course history. My 3 main series The Love We Live, Stiel Maiden and Bubblee & Victoria all cover the 3 main medians of content I personally enjoy. TLWL is essentially like your classic drama/slice of life anime, Stiel Maiden is an action/thriller story based heavily on the Tom Clancy style of storytelling, and B&V is a tongue & cheek free for all that crosses over being comedy, pure porn, sci-fi, fantasy and whatever else I can cram into it. Then of course there's Magnum Opus (which I will be getting to soon) which is technically my oldest story, as I actually brain stormed the baseline plot my last year in the service, and actually "tried" to get started on MG as a story called "Reign: Fist Of Justice"...which I only made like 8 pages for before getting side tracked by other shit. So yea, creatively I'm all over the place...lol. If I had the time, patience and money to invest...I'd probably be doing all of my comics in Daz...but that shit is time consuming AND costly. So TK17 is where my creative flag is planted until I decide I'm done as a whole.
OH YEA!!! I also was HEAVY into The Sims 2 and 3 for content between 2013 to 2016 alongside TK17...But I lost almost all of my Sims stuff to a HDD crash, and ended up sticking with TK17 full time.